Professor Kathy Belov is based in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences (SOLES) at the University of Sydney. Her research is focused on comparative genomics and immunogenetics of Australian wildlife. Her team study Tasmanian devils, koalas, wallabies, platypus and many other species. Kathy has received two Eureka awards, the Crozier medal and the Fenner medal for her research.

Dr. Karen Miga is an Assistant Research Scientist and Program Director of the Human Pangenome Production Center at the UCSC Genomics Institute, who works at the forefront of sequence technologies and computational data structures and repeat assembly strategies to generate telomere-to-telomere reference-quality assemblies of human chromosomes. She co-founded the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium, an open, community-based effort to generate the first complete assembly of a human genome. As a satellite DNA biologist, her research program develops innovative computational and experimental approaches to study the sequence and epigenetic organization of human centromeric and pericentromeric DNAs.

Dr. Adam Phillippy is currently a Senior Investigator and head of the Genome Informatics Section at the US National Human Genome Research Institute. His lab develops efficient computational methods for analyzing DNA sequencing data, including tools for genome assembly (Canu), genome alignment (MUMmer), genome clustering (Mash), microbial forensics (Parsnp), and metagenomics (Krona). For this work, he was recently awarded the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. As a co-founder of the Telomere-to-Telomere consortium, he is currently working towards finishing the remaining gaps in the human reference genome using emerging long-read sequencing technologies. His lab homepage can be found at https://genomeinformatics.github.io/

Winston Timp is an assistant professor in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.  His lab’s focus is in the development and application of sequencing technologies to gain a deeper understanding of biology and a more accurate set of clinical tools for human disease. Timp’s research integrates the principles of biophysics, molecular biology, and computational biology to create new tools for exploring the epigenomes and genomes of different lifeforms, ranging in size from the flu virus to hummingbirds to California redwoods. Based on the knowledge gained from these studies, Timp and his lab apply their toolsets to clinical samples for the diagnosis, surveillance and treatment of human disease. Recent projects in Timp’s lab include new sequencing methods to diagnose infectious disease, new methods to characterize RNA biology, and examining single molecule epigenetics of cancer.